Overview

"Winner of the 2023 Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry A trailblazing lesbian poet, child Holocaust survivor, and political activist whose work is deeply informed by socialist values, Irena Klepfisz is a vital and individual American voice. This book is the first complete collection of her work. For fifty years, Klepfisz has written powerful, searching poems about relatives murdered during the war, recent immigrants, a lost Yiddish writer, a Palestinian boy in Gaza, and various people in her life. In her introduction to Klepfisz's A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, Adrienne Rich wrote: ""[Klepfisz's] sense of phrase, of line, of the shift of tone, is almost flawless."" Her Birth and Later Years was a Finalist for the Jewish Book Award and winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry."

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9780819501080

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Reviews

"""Her verses on rebel womanhood, violent histories, queer love, and dissident, diasporic identity are urgent reading for the present.""--Molly Crabapple, Lux Magazine ""Her work can at first seem prosaic and understated, but her style gathers its power slowly and steadily, sneaking up on you perhaps even more strongly due to its apparent flatness...Klepfisz is a poet who has seen a lot and whose work offers a lot in return.""--Dale Boyer, The Gay & Lesbian Review/Worldwide ""Her verses on rebel womanhood, violent histories, queer love, and dissident, diasporic identity are urgent reading for the present.""--Molly Crabapple, Lux Magazine ""Her Birth and Later Years published this year by Wesleyan University Press, is an exploration of that terrain of ambiguity, between death and survival...""--Rokhl Kafrissen, Tablet Magazine ""In terrible times poetry comforts, challenges, and sustains. Irena Klepfisz has been doing all these through the decades. With this book she gives us an enormous measure of grace. It is evidence of the work done to change the world--a vision of and commitment to justice in the largest sense. We are fortunate, all of us, to have it.""--Dorothy Allison, author of Cavedweller ""This book is an absolute treasure for the readers of Irena Klepfisz, for readers of poetry, lesbian literature, and/or Jewish literature...The poet's voice simultaneously transcends time and is also deeply embedded within it.""--Zohar Weiman-Kelman, author of Queer Expectations: A Genealogy of Jewish Women's Poetry ""A profound work of martyrs and lovers. Intimate with history and the natural world, Irena's vibrant intelligence has a vulnerable heart. At every turn, from the cataclysm to the quotidian, a deep desire to connect and reach for truth illuminates and transcends these pages.""--Sarah Schulman, author of People in Trouble and Let the Record Show"

Author Information

IRENA KLEPFISZ (Brooklyn, NY) taught Jewish Women's Studies at Barnard College for 22 years. She is the author of four books of poetry including Periods of Stress, Keeper of Accounts, Different Enclosures, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, and a collection of essays Dreams of an Insomniac. She was co-editor of The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology. An advocate of the Yiddish language and active in its renaissance in the United States, she has published poetry and essays have appeared in Jewish Currents, Tablet Magazine, In Geveb, Sinister Wisdom, The Manhattan Review, Conditions, The Georgia Review and Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures. Her Birth and Later Years was a Finalist for the Jewish Book Award and winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry.

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